Are you on Bluesky? Let’s be honest: Probably not. The Twitter clone is still in beta and has been notoriously stingy with its invite codes. Its small size means that every time an influx of newbies arrives, the existing user base freaks out, filling the algorithmically curated “Discover” tab with incredibly overwrought complaints. A much-discussed recent post lamented that “Bluesky elders”—and here I should note that this is a service that launched a mobile version only in February—were suffering a degraded experience because of all the blow-ins. The phrase has become an instant meme.

You need to know only two things about Bluesky. The first is that its users are trying to make the word skeeting happen, although it’s an even worse alternative to tweeting than Mastodon’s tooting. The second is that it operates at a high emotional pitch at all times. Whereas scrolling Twitter’s “For You” tab is now like bobbing for apples in a bowl full of amateur race scientists and Roman-statue avatars lamenting that we no longer build cathedrals, the Bluesky equivalent features discussions of whether sending death threats to the site’s developers is acceptable if they really, really deserve it.

As far as I can tell, Bluesky is siphoning off both Twitter’s most emotionally dysregulated users and its most committed shitposters. I dare not post there—my account was briefly the most blocked on the app, according to a tracking service—but it’s nice to see that a small, tight-knit, and politically distinctive community has formed, albeit around shared interests that include hating me. Although it is a mere fraction of the size of the big social networks, Bluesky appears to have hit the critical mass needed to sustain itself, suggesting that Elon Musk’s actions at Twitter have irreparably fractured the service. We are now living in the post-Twitter era, literally and metaphorically. After Musk’s rebrand, X marks the spot where a large number of people no longer want to be.

Until recently, I doubted that even an owner as slapdash and capricious as Musk could bring down Twitter. The narcissists and addicts who linger there would put a barnacle to shame. The site has always been much smaller than Facebook, and it only mattered because politicians, journalists, and those who currently pass for public intellectuals were using it. Whether you read The New York Times or watched Fox News, you would encounter content that began its life on Twitter. When Twitter kicked Donald Trump off, it severely dented his ability to derail the news agenda, because journalists simply weren’t prepared to join Truth Social, the right-wing platform that the former president himself controls.

[From the May 2022 issue: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid]

Now, though, I can see the first glimmers of a post-Twitter world. The weirdos, early adopters, shitposters, furries, and scolds are trying out Bluesky, where they can complain about “Elmo” and his tenure in charge of “the bird site.” Actual young people are on TikTok. True Boomers never made it to Twitter and are still happily posting on Facebook about UFOs and Bunco nights. A handful of disgruntled tweeters tried Post and Mastodon, but the first is a graveyard, and the second is an obstacle course for non-techie users. The normies and the brands went to Instagram’s new Threads app, and then many of the normies promptly left because Threads was too boring without enough weirdos, furries, or scolds to add seasoning to the mix. (Corporations might love placing their ads next to unobjectionable inspirational content, but the cumulative effect is to make Threads like watching a television channel entirely composed of infomercials.) Grindfluencers—the type of people who listen to 15-minute summaries of Freakonomics and The Art of War—have always been happiest on LinkedIn, posting about their podcast drops and congratulating you on your “work anniversary,” which is not and never will be a real thing. Instagram is still full of hot people who are feeling #blessed and keen to demonstrate this humility by posing in a bikini by an infinity pool. (If these posters have a hot sister, she can wear a bikini too, and then they can observe that #familyiseverything.) Twitter is now the social network of choice for people who know what a Sonnenrad is and, moreover, believe it has been unfairly maligned.

And some people will have looked at all of the options above and decided, at last, to touch grass.

Many controversies in the early era of social media grew out of the assumption that users had a singular, coherent identity across platforms. The researchers danah boyd and Alice Marwick described the resulting discord as “context collapse”: Users invited criticism by speaking offhandedly, as if in a private room, before potentially limitless audiences on Twitter or Facebook. Too often, a joke that would have slayed between two close friends was held up for wider disapproval in a BuzzFeed listicle or a TV-news chyron. Now we have become better at sorting ourselves into different modes in different spaces, to the extent that I have seen people lament that they know who they are on Instagram and they know who they are on Twitter, but I don’t know who I am on Threads.

[Yair Rosenberg: How to redeem social media]

Given this trend, the surprise isn’t that Twitter has now splintered, but that it lasted so long. For many years, it was a coliseum where both the gladiators and the lions had volunteered to be. Twitter allowed the right to troll the libs, and the libs to mount cancellation campaigns against the slightly less lib.

Was that healthy? For a long time, I worried about the proliferation of what the Upworthy co-founder Eli Pariser called “filter bubbles,” which he defined as “your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online.” Perhaps polarization was driven by our imprisonment in echo chambers, I thought, and we were succumbing to pluralistic ignorance—a lack of awareness of the majority view. Now I wonder if the past decade of social media drove us all too far in the other direction, toward spending too much time with people unlike ourselves, herded together in ways that exaggerated our differences.

In 2018, the rationalist blogger who goes by Scott Alexander published a short story called “Sort by Controversial.” In it, a tech-start-up employee invents a program that can spit out “scissor statements”—assertions that instantly divide groups down the middle. The world avoids falling into perpetual low-grade warfare only because she accidentally creates a scissor statement that tears apart the company before its work is finished. The story captured the sense of social media as a rolling referendum on every subject under the sun. Were you a plane-seat recliner? Must you feed a visiting child dinner if they stayed late at your house? Was the dress blue or white? In political debates, that meant being force-fed the most head-banging obsessions of your political opponents. Take the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which exists purely to harvest ultraprogressive views from one social network and serve them up to another social network as rage bait. Its popularity makes me think that filter bubbles, at least in a mild form, might not be such a bad idea.

In order to thrive, communities need boundaries and norms—and even, God help us, elders. That’s why I enjoy sticking my nose into Bluesky and taking a deep huff every so often. It’s a walled garden for people with a mutual interest in anime genitalia and cruel jokes about Mitch McConnell. They’re happy there. You probably wouldn’t be. And that’s okay.

Growing up in the bilingual city of Kyiv in the 1990s, I studied the Ukrainian language like a museum object—intensely, but at a distance, never quite feeling all of its textures or bringing it home. Back then, in that part of the country, Ukrainian was reserved for formal settings: schools, banks, and celebrations, often infused with a performative flare of ethnic pride. Russian dominated the mundane and the intimate: gossiping with friends during recess, writing in a journal, arguing with parents. I straddled both languages with my grandmother, who spoke surzhyk, a colloquial mix of the two.

I spoke Russian not because I had any particular connection to it, but because it was an easy default. For 400 years, Russian had seeped into Ukrainian life and across Ukrainian territory: In the process of colonizing the south of Ukraine, the Russian empire called the area the “New Russia,” imposing the language of the metropole on the Ukrainian-speaking population. During the 19th century, Russians, as well as members of other ethnic minorities, populated newly industrialized towns in the Donbas region to work in factories and mines while rural areas remained largely Ukrainian-speaking. As peasants flocked to the cities, Russian became the language of status and social mobility.

[From the June 2022 issue: Ukraine and the words that lead to mass murder]

But when Russia launched an all-out war not only on Ukrainian territory, but also on its independent identity and culture, passive acceptance of the linguistic status quo came to feel like a moral failure. A language once used neutrally as a tool for communication now evoked terror, centuries-long erasure, and oppression. Russian had become the language of filtration camps and interrogations, and speaking it felt like relinquishing one small means to resist.

Self-assertion through language was not a new concept for Ukrainians. The country’s independence in 1991 had come with the promise of a collective return to the Ukrainian language. But the transition didn’t really gain momentum until the 2014 Revolution of Dignity and Russia’s invasion of the Donbas that spring. A 2019 language law established Ukrainian as the state language, requiring it in more than 30 areas of public life, including media and education. Then came the full-scale war in 2022. With Russian imperialism on full display, reviving Ukrainian became a kind of national project: People deliberately committed to speaking their native language, regardless of how well they’d known it or spoken it before.

In a survey conducted some eight months after the full-scale invasion, 71 percent of Ukrainians said they’d started speaking Ukrainian more; a poll from January 2023 indicated that 33 percent of Kyiv’s residents had switched to Ukrainian. All businesses registered in Ukraine are required by law to make Ukrainian the language of their landing pages. As of April, to become a Ukrainian citizen, you need to pass an exam that includes a written component in Ukrainian as well as a 10-minute monologue based on a prompt, in addition to a section on Ukraine’s constitution and history.

“We’re undergoing a kind of rebirth of the language. We’re only beginning to discover what’s always been ours,” Volodymyr Dibrova, a writer and translator who teaches Ukrainian at Harvard, told me. Not religion or territory, but language, Dibrova said, turned out to be the ethno-consolidating factor for Ukrainians—the main external element that differentiated us from the enemy. “It’s as if people have woken up and are asking: Who are we? What does our real history look like? What is our language?”

For me and other predominantly Russian-speaking Ukrainians, the new language context meant wrestling with a kind of cultural dissonance: If Ukrainian was our language, why didn’t we speak it all the time? Why wasn’t it the language of our relationships and of all occasions—formal address but also chitchat, marital fights, grieving?

This question occupied my mind as I began shifting into Ukrainian with previously Russian-speaking friends. I’d lived in the United States for 20 years, and Russian remained the language of my Ukrainian friendships. One friend, originally from Donetsk, from whom I’d not heard a word of Ukrainian in our 25 years of friendship, caught me off guard when she answered my call in Ukrainian to give me parking instructions when I visited her in Pennsylvania.

“You switched to Ukrainian?” I said, buying time to assess how this shift might change our closeness and connection. Throughout our visit, I fumbled through getting my points across in Ukrainian; my thoughts felt flat and my vocabulary lackluster. My mind raced to find the right word in Ukrainian, and I often slipped into a pathetic mix of Russian and English words. I was proud of us both, yet each conversation felt exhausting. With my parents, who live in Kyiv, shifting to Ukrainian still feels new and uncomfortable, a strain on dynamics already complicated by the war and living on different continents.

I know of even more complicated linguistic relationships. Oleksandra Burlakova, a digital-content creator and video blogger in Kyiv, grew up in a Russian-speaking family in the eastern city of Lysychansk. She completely shifted to Ukrainian in 2021 to solidify her national identity, but her husband wasn’t ready to make the change until February 24, 2022, the day the Russian invasion began. For nearly a year, the couple spoke two different languages.

“You fall in love with the whole person, including their language, and then it changes,” she told me. “It was very unusual.”

Burlakova recalled how hard it was at first to match the right Ukrainian words to her emotions. “I’d seen people fighting in Ukrainian on TV, but I’d never seen it in real life,” she said. But after immersing herself in Ukrainian books, movies, and music, she was able to begin aligning her verbal expression with her inner experience. “I felt like a whole person again.”

The Ukrainian language activist and TikToker Danylo Haidamakha made a complete switch to Ukrainian as a teenager and aptly describes how scary the plunge can be. “For me, the language switch—it’s like swimming off one shore, not knowing if you’re going to make it across to the other shore,” he said in an interview last year.

To me, making that departure felt like exposing a vulnerable, unexamined part of who I was. I saw how steeped my consciousness had been in the narratives of Russification, which for centuries convinced Ukrainians that their language was somehow unrefined and inferior to Russian. In the 19th century, the Russian empire banned Ukrainian-language literature and art, excluding it from public life. During Stalin’s rule, even the particularities of Ukrainian phonetics—the language’s suffixes and endings—were viewed as a threat, and Ukrainian words were twisted to sound more Russian or eliminated from the dictionary to make the two languages seem more alike.

[Read: What Ukrainian literature has always understood about Russia]

Along with wiping out millions of Ukrainian lives during the artificial famine of the 1930s, the Stalinist regime deprived the surviving Ukrainians of the ability to think or speak, Christina Pikhmanets, a Ukrainian linguist and educational and cultural adviser at Sesame Workshop, told me. “Language is the center of decision making,” she said. “Around the language, we form the social and cultural understanding of who we are.” Pikhmanets is currently helping translate Sesame Street into Ukrainian, and in doing so she tries to avoid words borrowed from Russian or English.

Studying one’s native language seems like a contradiction in terms. But many Ukrainians need to “activate” their linguistic inheritance, Burlakova believes. Ukrainian conversation clubs and online schools have sprouted to help with that. TikTok and Instagram brim with young Ukrainians unearthing the richness of the language.

One of the more astounding finds on Ukrainian-language TikTok is a post suggesting nearly 30 Ukrainian synonyms for the word vagina. Another post lists Ukrainian words for rare colors such as periwinkle, cinderblock, and wheat. The latter is the work of Anna Finyk, who has more than 20,000 followers, and who told me she grew up speaking surzhyk, the informal hodgepodge of two languages my grandmother spoke.

As a university student, Finyk began refining her speech to eradicate Russified words. After the February 2022 invasion, she wanted to help others do the same. “My mission is to help people improve their language without any pressure,” she told me. In her playful posts, she excavates old Ukrainian words and synonyms, exposes mispronounced words, and pretends to be a translation service spewing authentic Ukrainian equivalents for such words and phrases as the wine is fermenting, exploitation, and quicksilver.

The war has given birth to a slew of new idioms and expressions in Ukrainian. Together with her colleagues, Alla Kishchenko, a philologist and lecturer in applied linguistics at Odesa Mechnikov National University, has been collecting new phrases tied to specific moments of the war. My favorite on the list is zatrydni, or “in three days,” a reference to Russia’s failed plan to conquer Kyiv in three days, which now refers to a person making unrealistic plans. Makronyty uses the name of French President Emmanuel Macron to describe a public appearance that does not correspond to substantive action. “These expressions are built on irony, sarcasm, and satire,” Kishchenko told me. “This contemporary folklore helps us feel a kind of unity.”

Collective language-making offers some playfulness amid the onslaught of Russian atrocities. On the website Slovotvir, where people can suggest and vote for new Ukrainian words to replace borrowed English words such as deadline, screenshot, and puzzle, the proposed word for tablet is a Ukrainian word roughly translated as “swiper”; the highest-voted equivalent for the @ symbol, previously denoted by the Russian word for dog, is now the Ukrainian word for snail. Ukrainian equivalents for hashtag and like are already widely used in speech.

The voting website makes clear that its creators’ goal is not to force the usage of new words, but to give people options. And replacing foreign words that have crept into the Ukrainian language with authentically Ukrainian equivalents is not possible in every instance. You’d need a full sentence to describe the concept of “catering” in Ukrainian, for example. Still, Pikhmanets, of Sesame Street, endorses the effort: “If we borrow the word, we borrow the context and the culture,” she told me.

Today’s work is a bit like putting together a puzzle, uncovering the shape of a language subjected to centuries of suppression. Throughout those centuries, Ukrainian survived in rural communities and in the country’s west, developing a diversity of quirks and dialects. But Russification policies shut down any effort to standardize the literary language and precluded its proliferation and modernization. A literary ideal of the language will eventually come into balance with the messiness of colloquial speech, according to Pikhmanets: “Language is a living organism, and it’s supposed to evolve and change,” she said.

Put another way, strengthening the Ukrainian language at its core will be the simultaneous work of literature, music, art, and everyday speech—“the collective commitment and persistent efforts of the entire society,” as Volodymyr Dibrova said.

For those of us just beginning to make Ukrainian our language of first resort, an atmosphere of inclusive effort is freeing. More proficient speakers and language experts almost encourage us to make mistakes. After all, perhaps the proper endings and suffixes are not the main point.

Mastery will arrive one day, I’m hopeful, but first will come the awkward pauses and sloppy turns of phrase. These imperfections, too, inhabit ideals that the Ukrainian language represents: freedom, resilience, and empathy.

The videos on TikTok, since taken down, showed an animated version of the murdered two-year-old.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

In 1980, the film critic Roger Ebert attended a conference filled with discussion about “new home video entertainment centers.” When he left, he was disturbed. He laid out his concerns about the future of movie-going in an eerily prescient Atlantic article—and, in the process, offered a great description of that unique yet universal experience:

I have a simple idea of what it means to go to the movies. You buy your ticket and take a seat in a large dark room with hundreds of strangers. You slide down in your seat and make yourself comfortable. On the screen in front of you, the movie image appears—enormous and overwhelming. If the movie is a good one, you allow yourself to be absorbed in its fantasy, and its dreams become part of your memories.

Watching movies on TV, without a crowd, is just not the same, Ebert argued: “A lot of the fun of seeing a movie such as Jaws or Star Wars comes, for me, from the massed emotion of the theater audience. When the shark attacks, we all levitate three inches above our seats, and come down screaming and laughing.”

Ebert could not predict the technological advances in at-home entertainment nor the ways in which the coronavirus pandemic would alter movie-going, perhaps forever. But the magic he describes is not from a bygone era. As evidenced most recently by “Barbeinheimer,” people still show up to the theater seeking this communal experience. Today’s newsletter is dedicated not to movies themselves, but to the act of going to see them together.

On Movie-Going

Movies Are Best Before Noon

By Jeff Oloizia

In praise of starting the day with enjoyable things

The Nearly Extinct Movie Tradition Filmmakers Should Bring Back

By Adrienne Bernhard

For theatergoers, the all-but-obsolete musical overture is a bridge between real life and the world they’re about to enter. (From 2018)

Why People Faint at the Theater

By Christine Ro

How a distressing movie or play can trigger a body to pass out (From 2017)

Still Curious?

Hollywood cannot survive without movie theaters: Our culture writer David Sims asks: Why is this so hard for studios to believe? Hollywood’s huge Barbenheimer fumble: Not taking advantage of the movies’ success would be a catastrophic mistake, David argues.

Other Diversions

A very tasty, very cold experiment TikTok is doing something very un-TikTok. How to have your most fulfilling vacation ever

P.S.

Reading Ebert’s 1980 article, I couldn’t help but think about Nicole Kidman’s AMC-theaters ad, which is somewhat silly but also surprisingly affecting (at least for this earnest movie-goer). “We come to this place for magic,” she says, after walking through the rain in stilettos and arriving at a movie theater—“to laugh, to cry, to care. Because we need that, all of us.” Last year, in Buzzfeed News, David Mack explored how the Kidman ad has turned into something of a “camp cultural phenomenon.”

— Isabel

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

I’m still rounding up your emails about the song “Fast Car” and coverage of race in journalism––they’ll run early next week and then we’ll be back on our regular newsletter schedule.

Conversations of Note

Locked Up in a Heat Wave

In a Marshall Project article that draws on work by the ACLU, Jamiles Lartey makes the case that incarcerated people, including children, are at serious risk from lack of air-conditioning:

This week, more than a third of the U.S. population was under excessive heat warnings and heat advisories. Dozens of major cities and states have set new temperature records in recent weeks, including Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which logged its hottest June ever.

Less than an hour from the city is Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola prison, where the state set up a temporary youth jail last fall, in a building that once housed adults awaiting execution.

A federal court filing this week from the Louisiana American Civil Liberties Union alleges that the youth at Angola face inhumane conditions, in large part because they are regularly kept in non-airconditioned cells for up to 72 hours. In a statement to the court, medical expert Dr. Susi U. Vassallo called the practice “foolhardy and perilous,” and said, “I would not dare to keep my dog in these conditions for fear of my dog dying.”

This June and July at the prison, the heat index has regularly exceeded 125 degrees, which the National Weather Services classifies as “extreme danger” for heat-related illness and death.

In 2021, Louisiana spent $2.8 million to study what it would cost to cool all of its prisons with air conditioning, but it is still waiting on results. In the meantime, adults at Angola — the state’s largest facility — struggle for relief. “It’s over 100 degrees in there. I lie on the floor. I barely can breathe. God, it feels like it’s suffocating!” an unidentified person told The Advocate.

Conditions in Texas are likely even worse.

How to Increase Diversity at the Top

In The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey highlights research on the outsize impact that 12 highly selective colleges have on shaping the American elite, and argues that even with new restrictions on race-based affirmative action, “a straightforward set of policies” exist “that would still let these schools diversify themselves—without making any sacrifice in terms of student quality or ambition.”

She outlines those policies:

The first step is to eliminate legacy admissions, as Wesleyan did last week. Most of these schools have an extremely strong preference for the children of alumni, and especially the children of wealthy alumni … Legacy kids whose parents are in the top 1 percent of the earnings distribution have a 40-percentage-point advantage in admissions compared with non-legacy kids with equivalent test scores; that advantage falls to just 15 percentage points for less wealthy students. This alumni preference acts as affirmative action for wealthy white kids.

Second is getting rid of recruitment policies for athletes. Participating in a sport—including a niche, moneyed sport such as fencing or sailing—gives kids an admissions boost equivalent to earning an additional 200 points on the SAT, one study found. At many elite schools, athletic programs function as a way to shuttle in rich kids who would not get in otherwise. “People sometimes have the intuition that student athletes might come disproportionately from lower-income or middle-income families,” Chetty told me. “That’s not true.”

Third is putting less emphasis on super-high “non-academic” ratings. Pretty much all kids who matriculate at the Ivy Plus institutions have résumés thick with leadership-cultivating, creativity-showcasing activity: volunteering, playing an instrument, making art. But kids from the country’s Eton-like secondary schools, such as Exeter and Milton, tend to have especially strong recommendations and padded résumés, ones Harvard and Yale love. “These admissions preferences tilt strongly in favor of the rich,” Chetty noted.

Getting rid of the admissions policies favoring athletes, legacies, and résumé padders would increase the share of kids from the bottom 95 percent of the parental-income distribution by nearly nine percentage points, the study finds. Yale, Harvard, and the other super-elite schools would each replace about 150 kids from rich families with kids from low- and middle-income families each year. In addition, the economists find, schools could bolster their admissions preferences for low- and middle-income kids with excellent test scores…

I would add one more policy … simply matriculating many more students. The Ivy Plus schools have a combined endowment of more than $200 billion … Surely they could enroll many more kids.

Oppenheimer-Adjacent

In the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney argues that the U.S. should not have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan at the end of World War II and the associated idea that  “nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima [meant] flipping a lever, rerouting the trolley, and causing the death of fewer people.”

He writes:

The trolley problem is a philosophical exercise meant to test the distinction between the moral weight of the actions we choose versus the consequences of inaction. Is it the better decision to take an action that kills one person versus taking an inaction that results in five deaths? It’s a fine ethical exercise, but it’s inapplicable in real life … We know where a trolley will go if we don’t flip a switch because there is a track there. We don’t know what Japan’s military and civilian population would have done had we not flipped the switch.

Defenders of the atomic bomb say that our only alternative to the deliberate slaughter of tens of thousands of noncombatants, including babies and elderly women, was a massive land invasion that would have cost millions of lives. They present this as if it was one of two sets of train tracks available.

People who were very involved at the time disagree. Again, Eisenhower said the Japanese were about to surrender. Eisenhower told his biographer that he expressed to War Secretary Harry Stimson his “grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”

Was Eisenhower right that the atomic bomb was “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives”? I don’t know! Neither do you! There’s a lot of uncertainty here.

Among the classic arguments for the course America did take is Paul Fussell’s 1981 essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” Also relevant were the lives of people still under brutal Japanese occupation. What effect would each choice have on how long their subjugation lasted?

Why Are There So Few Great Comedy Movies Today?

In conversation with Noam Dworman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar, the economist Tyler Cowen asks that question and puts forth a hypothesis:

Cowen: Why are there so few great comedy movies today? And TV shows, for that matter. It used to be top TV shows were comedies — not all of them — Seinfeld the clearest example. Now for a long time, HBO, dramas. What happened?

Dworman: The obvious answer that most people would say is because you can’t make those jokes anymore. Most of the classic comedies had jokes which would be considered off-limits today.

Cowen: But they’re not mostly that politically incorrect. Seinfeld is less politically incorrect than Curb Your Enthusiasm, but there’s not a Seinfeld of today, is there? In movies, you can go pretty far out. Most of the funny movies from the past, like Bringing Up Baby — it’s pretty funny. It’s not politically incorrect at all.

Dworman: [laughs] It’s coming around, that kind of comedy. I don’t know, Tyler. Do you have a thought on that?

Cowen: We seem to be getting funny bits in different ways, and they’re more condensed, and they come at a higher information density, and we can pull them off the internet or TikTok whenever we want. It seems that sates us, and we enjoy the feeling of control over comedy, which you don’t quite get when you’re watching, say, a hundred-minute film. That would be my hypothesis.

Dworman: Does that mean that there are movies that have been made which are funny and would deserve the success of a classic comedy, they’re just not getting appreciated?

Cowen: No, they don’t get made… it could also be audiences are themselves less funny. They’re more depressed, they’re more neurotic. We see some of that in the data, at least for young people. I suspect that’s not the main reason, but part of it.

Dworman: I don’t know. Sometimes there isn’t a reason. Sometimes there’s just a golden age. Let’s compare it to music. Why is music a little bit stagnant now? Maybe that’s just the ebb and flow of where it’s at, and we’re trying to correlate it to something, but it has nothing to do with that. Maybe it’s just that the great talents are doing other things now, or a lot of the jokes have been told. I don’t know, but there are definitely golden ages of every art form.

Cowen: But comedy is still in a golden age; it’s just not in movies and television.

Do you disagree with the premise and believe there are great comedy movies today?

Freddie deBoer believes that the concept of “equality of opportunity” is “a mess” and that society ought to abandon it as a lodestar. He writes:

What happens if someone reaches their potential by becoming a D+ student who just barely graduates from high school and ends up a ditch digger making $24,000 a year? What if a life spent in material deprivation and constant financial insecurity is the outcome of a genuinely equal opportunity?

What if someone’s potential is correctly fulfilled when they end up in a life that’s barren of wealth, stability, and success? If equality of opportunity means anything, then it must include such outcomes. I constantly have to make this point when discussing education, a field where failure is seen as inherently a matter of injustice and yet one where there will always be a distribution of performance - a distribution with a bottom as well as a top.

What if someone faces a completely equal playing field and, through the full expression of their talent and hard work, ends up totally ill-equipped for the job market? I find that you can get people on board with that kind of outcome if the loser in question came from great privilege; people like the cosmic karma of the most privileged being severely downwardly mobile. But what if someone is born into poverty and stays there, and that static outcome genuinely reflects them operating at the peak of their potential?

That would have to constitute a successful implementation of a system of equal opportunity. And yet most people would likely still feel sympathy for that person and demand a better life for them. If that sympathy is systemic rather than individual, it would seem to suggest that equal opportunity is not in fact what people see as the correct system. Rather, equal opportunity functions as a moral backstop for the system that they’re already in - and provided the story of equal opportunity is always told in terms of the dedicated and smart person who rises above hardscrabble beginnings, it remains emotionally satisfying. But the person who gets all of the required opportunity and still struggles his way to a life of destitution is just as much a story of equal opportunity as that one.

It seems to me that in a wealthy society, equality of opportunity is most defensible when paired with a social safety net that creates a minimum standard of living available to everyone. Of course, what that “floor” ought to be is contested. Is it enough for a just society to meet basic survival needs? Is John Rawls right that we ought to maximize the status of the least well-off? Should everyone be guaranteed a job and a living wage? One could pose as many questions as there are visions of how we ought to be. But once nutritious food, comfortable shelter, and health care are available to those unable to get them, it seems to me that equality of opportunity to excel becomes a quite defensible way to organize a society. If realized in the U.S., it would certainly improve on the status quo.

Krysten Wagner, a Los Angeles–based TikTok influencer, is defending her decision to promote products on TikTok while wearing a face mask that’s on sale for $50. In a video from June, Wagner squeezes white cream from a shiny blue tube and begins applying it to her taut, perfectly clear skin. “If you’re not familiar,” she says, smearing the cream on her forehead, “you can now shop in the TikTok app.”

For the past few months, she has been experimenting with a new TikTok feature that allows users to buy the products that she mentions in her videos directly through the app by tapping a little label with an orange shopping-cart icon. Not all of her followers have taken to it kindly. In the comments, some complain these videos hawking products are flooding their feeds with what feels like sponsored content. She assures them that she has no relationship with the brand. She just genuinely likes Summer Fridays’ Jet Lag Mask! If “you really hate” her and don’t want her to get a commission, you have her permission to go buy it at Sephora instead.

TikTok has seemingly become a shopping app. The platform now allows approved retailers to list their products for sale directly on TikTok, where creators like Wagner can promote them and earn a small fee from each purchase. (TikTok, of course, also takes a portion of each sale.) The feature, called TikTok Shop, is still technically in testing mode in the United States, but videos mentioning products you can buy already seem to be sliding into user feeds right next to videos of dogs doing something silly or clips from old movies. Meanwhile, the app’s livestreams have become QVC-like places where sellers are nonstop pitching products to live audiences.

The test hasn’t been entirely smooth: TikTok Shop has seemingly struggled to take off in its early days, a jarring reality for an app that has become known for features that are potent, easy to use, and often mysterious. Powered by a spookily efficient algorithmic feed, TikTok can suck you into an endless flow of content before you even realize what is happening. Even TikTok’s ad experience is discreet and smooth compared with watching ads on other video sites. Now, for once, TikTok is showing its hand. Will users like what they see?

TikTok’s turn to e-commerce, in theory, has the potential to be massive, capable of competing with the likes of Amazon. That’s because the amount of time the average user spends on TikTok is monstrously huge. Because users often encounter new videos through TikTok’s “For You” page, the algorithms that power it can be twisted to show shopping content to all those eyeballs.

The company started testing TikTok Shop last year, first in Indonesia, and later in the United Kingdom. The test finally arrived in the United States in November, beginning with hundreds of retailers, and since then it has spread to include more shop owners. Some have seen real success with the feature. Allie Mitrovich, a recent college grad in Maryland who sells colorful stickers, bookmarks, and apparel that say things like hot girls read!, told me that the effect of TikTok Shop has been “night and day” for her small business. She’s posted videos of herself holding a thick stack of freshly printed shipping labels, all from TikTok Shop orders.

Even though the e-commerce functionality hasn’t fully been rolled out globally, the company reportedly aims to sell more than $20 billion worth of items through the portal this year. This is just the beginning of its turn toward shopping: In August, according to The Wall Street Journal, the company will take a page from Amazon’s book and store, ship, and handle logistics for third-party stores selling items on the app.

But TikTok Shop is hardly guaranteed to be successful, even once it’s more than just a test run. A TikTok representative would not share numbers or comment about how TikTok Shop is doing. But a recent report from Insider Intelligence, a market-research company, noted that, though TikTok is a major product-discovery tool, particularly for Gen Z, shopping via livestream and in-app checkouts remain unpopular in the U.S. overall. They advise merchants that TikTok Shop “is a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have,” Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst for social media at the company, told me over email.

Some fancy things are listed through the feature, but it also is home to a lot of junk. Among the best-selling products I spotted last week include a $12 travel jewelry box and a $10 pink flag that says Taylor Swift for president—merch that is presumably unlicensed, unless Swift is planning something big for 2024. A representative for TikTok declined to answer a question about what “Bestseller” means on the app. Zach Fitch, a campaign strategist at the influencer-marketing firm Ubiquitous, told me that many of the brands he works with are wary of Shop because of the fees that TikTok charges. And the looming potential of a nationwide TikTok ban doesn’t help.

Customers also seem wary. Take the case of Revolve, a fashion retailer that is sort of like a cool-girl online-only Nordstrom. That the merchant’s expensive minidresses and crop tops are on TikTok Shop seems like a coup for the platform. But at least so far, Revolve doesn’t seem to be doing as much business on TikTok Shop: The company’s top-selling item—a blush—has moved under 2,000 units, according to the Shop listing. (Revolve did not respond to a request for comment.) Wagner, the creator who made the face-mask video, told me that engagement has been mixed: Though one of her affiliate posts did amazing, another had “embarrassingly low” views (“and it was a great video!” she said).

At the moment, TikTok’s shopping features feel “too transactional,” Permele Doyle, the president of Billion Dollar Boy, a creator-marketing company, told me. Getting used to in-app shopping requires a pretty big cultural shift in how we think about social media: Try to imagine Amazon and TikTok merging into a single app that you use every day. So far, other platforms have struggled to integrate commerce in this way. Facebook shut down its live-shopping feature last fall, and earlier this year, Instagram kicked its shopping tab out of the main feed, though the app still supports shopping features. Doyle summarized the overall sentiment toward in-app shopping as “brands want to get there, but the platforms haven’t proved it can work yet.”

TikTok, in particular, might be ill-suited for shopping. At its roots, TikTok has more of an authenticity culture than Instagram does: Wagner pointed out that the app was initially “so refreshing” because the people going viral weren’t influencers—“just regular people who happened to be famous by accident.” In theory, that could lend them credibility as salespeople. But it could also work against the platform: Why is that random person on TikTok who seemed like a friend now trying to sell things?

Even though consumers and brands are feeling hesitant, if TikTok wants to tilt the algorithmic scale toward e-commerce, it can and probably will. The history of social platforms is littered with examples of powerful tech companies pushing their business priorities even when consumers balk. For now, to see TikTok making its intentions so clear, even as it stumbles, feels strange and new. For so long, TikTok’s growth has seemed limitless, its power frightening. But maybe even all of that can’t get people to buy a $50 face mask.

When Megan Nolan published her first novel, fellow authors warned her in “ominous tones” about the website Goodreads. The young Irish writer looked at the book’s listing there in the winter of 2020, the day the first proof copy arrived at her house. “Nobody but me and the publisher had seen it,” she wrote recently. “Despite this, it had received one review already: two stars, left by someone I had inconsequential personal discord with. It was completely impossible for him to have read the book.”

The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry. The review site, which Amazon bought in 2013, can shape the conversation around a book or an author, both positively and negatively. Today’s ostensible word-of-mouth hits are more usually created online, either via Goodreads or social networks such as Instagam and TikTok.

Publishers know how important these dynamics are, and so they send out advanced reading copies, or ARCs, not just to independent booksellers who might stock a title, but also to influencers who might make content about it. “There’s an assumption that if you receive an ARC that you will post about it,” Traci Thomas, host of the literary podcast The Stacks, told me—“whether that’s on your Goodreads, on your Instagram, on your TikTok, tell other people in your bookstore, or whatever. And so that’s how it ends up that there’s so many reviews of a book that’s not out yet.”

Many book bloggers are conscientious about including a disclaimer on their posts thanking the publisher for giving them an ARC “in exchange for an honest review.” But disclosing freebies is far from a contractual requirement or even a social norm. So you can’t easily discern which early reviewers have actually read the book, and which ones might be reacting to social-media chatter (or, as Nolan suspected in her case, prosecuting a personal grudge).

That matters because viral campaigns target unpublished books all the time. What tends to happen is that one influential voice on Instagram or TikTok deems a book to be “problematic,” and then dozens of that person’s followers head over to Goodreads to make the writer’s offense more widely known. Authors who reply to these attacks risk making the situation worse. Kathleen Hale—who was so infuriated by a mean reviewer that she tracked down the woman’s address—wrote later that the site had warned her against engagement: “At the bottom of the page, Goodreads had issued the following directive (if you are signed in as an author, it appears after every bad review of a book you’ve written): ‘We really, really (really!) don’t think you should comment on this review, even to thank the reviewer.’” Most authors I know read their Goodreads reviews, and then silently fume over them alone. Because I am a weirdo, I extract great enjoyment from mine—the more petty and baffling the complaints, the better. “I listened to the audiobook and by chapter 3 it started to annoy me the little pause she made before the word ‘male,’” reads one review of my book, Difficult Women.

When the complaints are more numerous and more serious, it’s known as “review-bombing” or “brigading.” A Goodreads blitzkrieg can derail an entire publication schedule, freak out commercial book clubs that planned to discuss the release, or even prompt nervous publishers to cut the marketing budget for controversial titles. Last month, the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert withdrew her upcoming novel The Snow Forest from publication because of the backlash she received after revealing it was set in Soviet Russia. The Goodreads page for The Snow Forest, which has since been taken down, accused her of romanticizing the Russian soul. “I’ll cut the job for you—they don’t have any,” wrote one reviewer. Another wrote: “Just like her characters in this nover [sic] are unaware of the events of WWII, Elizabeth Gilbert herself seems to be unaware of the genocidal war russia is conducting against Ukraine RIGHT NOW, because I’m sure if she knew, she’d realise how tone deaf this book is.”

[Read: Eat, pray, pander]

The book had been scheduled for release next February, but in a video announcing that it was “not the time for this book to be published,” Gilbert essentially endorsed the Goodreads criticisms: “I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are all continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”

Now, I don’t know whether The Snow Forest romanticized the Russian soul or would somehow have caused “harm” to Ukrainians. Like my colleague Franklin Foer, I find the allegations hard to believe. But the plain fact is that neither of us know, because—and this should be obvious, although recent events suggest it is not—you don’t know what’s in a book you haven’t read. You also don’t know what’s in a film you haven’t watched, an album you haven’t heard, or an article you haven’t clicked on. That used to matter. It no longer does, because we live in a world where you can harvest likes by circulating screenshots of headlines and out-of-context video clips, and where marketing campaigns are big enough that they constitute artistic statements in themselves. (Barbie, I’m looking at you.)

Unfortunately, the artworks most likely to run into trouble in this viral hellscape are those that explore complicated, incendiary topics such as sex, race, and identity. Another Goodreads drama played out recently over Everything’s Fine, a debut novel written by Cecilia Rabess and published on June 6. Its plot centers on a young, progressive Black woman who falls in love with a conservative white man in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s election. “It obviously tackles some lightning-rod issues about race, class, and politics and identity in America,” Rabess told me, and so she expected strong reactions on Goodreads and similar sites. “But I think people certainly hadn’t read the book. And so I don’t know how they came to the conclusions that they did—that the book didn’t handle these topics carefully or thoughtfully or intentionally.”

Chalk that characterization up as writerly understatement. “It’s not enemies to lovers if you use it to excuse racists,” a typical one-star review read, referencing a common romance-novel trope. “Some authors shouldn’t be authors bc wtf is this!?” another offered. “i haven’t read this book nor do I plan to but having read the synopsis, I’m rating it 1-star,” a third confessed.

In the case of Everything’s Fine, the pile-on appears to have started on TikTok, where a handful of prominent creators criticized the book. The swell of anger then migrated to Goodreads, where those creators’ fans could register their disapproval. “i didnt and will not even read this i came from tiktok to say i hope the sales are so bad the bookstores have to throw away all inventory because it refuses to sell. anyone who gets an ARC of this should be ashamed,” noted another one-star review.

For Rabess, the experience was brutal. “As an artist, you’re prepared for people to not resonate with the work,” she said. “But I think it feels different when people decide that you yourself are problematic, or you yourself are causing harm, or whatever language they use to describe it. It feels a little bit surreal.” The backlash might have flourished on Goodreads, but it soon escaped to the wider internet. Rabess, who is Black, received angry direct messages and emails, as well as abusive comments under any social-media posts she made. “They said nasty things about me, about my children. Called me coon, other really unpleasant slurs. Told me that I’d be better off dead.”

The anger was scattershot. The commenters using racial slurs clearly knew Rabess’s race, but she wondered if some other online critics assumed that she was a white author intruding on territory they felt should be reserved for writers of color. While authors are sensibly told not to read the reviews—and certainly not to engage with critics—that’s harder when the critics come right up in your (virtual) face and shout their opinions at you.

[Read: The companies that are killing creativity]

As it happens, the podcaster Traci Thomas was among those who disliked Rabess’s book—albeit after reading an advance copy, back in January. “It’s an icky book,” she told me. She objected to what she saw as the moral of the story: Love conquers all, even being a Trump supporter. “The boyfriend in the book, Josh, is wearing a MAGA hat and, like, saying racist shit to [the female protagonist]. And she’s like, It’s fine. And the big revelation for her is that she can still choose to love him. And I’m just like: Okay, cool, go off—and I’m gonna tear this book to shreds.”

Ultimately, Thomas concluded, “I don’t know that the book needs to exist.”

Despite her own strong feelings, Thomas told me that she sometimes felt uneasy about her own reviews being surrounded by knee-jerk reactions and “performative allyship,” even by people whose politics she shared. “There are people who are new to anti-racism work or supporting LGBTQ people, or disability activism or whatever. And they feel it is their job to call out things that they notice without perhaps understanding the bigger historical context.” To illustrate the point, she gave an example: Imagine an author writes a book about Black children riding tricycles, “and then I’ll see a review that’s like, ‘This book didn’t talk about Black preschoolers who ride bikes, and they’re also at risk.’”

That dynamic explains one of the most initially counterintuitive aspects of viral pile-ons: that many seem to target authors who would agree with their critics on 99 percent of their politics. A strange kind of progressive one-upmanship is at work here: Anyone can condemn Ann Coulter’s latest book, but pointing out the flaws in a feminist or anti-racist book, or a novel by a Black female author, establishes the critic as the occupant of a higher moral plane.

The net effect of this is to hobble books by progressive authors such as Gilbert, and by writers of color such as Rabess. The latter is philosophical about the controversy over Everything’s Fine, seeing the backlash as representative of the political moment she was exploring in the novel—of “people feeling a dearth of community and connection, and just wanting a way to connect, a way to express themselves or express their anger.”

Of course, if Goodreads wanted to, it could fix the review-bombing problem overnight. When services that rely on user-generated content are only lightly moderated, it’s always a conscious decision, and usually a cold commercial one. After Gilbert pulled her novel from publication, The Washington Post observed that Amazon, which reportedly paid $150 million for Goodreads, now shows little interest in maintaining or updating the site. Big changes to a heavily trafficked site can be costly and risk annoying the existing user base: Reddit has recently faced down a moderators’ revolt for changes to how developers can access its tools, and Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter—or whatever it’s now called—will one day be taught at business schools on a slide headlined “How to Lose Advertisers and Alienate People.” A purge of duplicate accounts might sweep up some fanatically devoted Goodreads users—people who can’t bear to share their opinion only once—and make the site feel less busy and exciting.

Goodreads spokesperson Suzanne Skyvara told me by email that the site “takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously.” She added that Goodreads is working to “stay ahead of content and accounts that violate our reviews or community guidelines” and has “increased the number of ways members can flag content to us.”

The main Amazon site has several measures in place to stop review-bombing: Reviews from verified purchasers of books are flagged as such to bolster their credibility, while the star rating is the product of a complicated algorithm rather than simply an average of all the review scores. Goodreads could adopt even more stringent measures—but then, it isn’t in the company’s interests to reduce volume in favor of quality, because its entire appeal is based around being a grassroots voice. “Goodreads really needs a mechanism for stopping one-star attacks on writers,” the writer Roxane Gay tweeted after Gilbert’s statement in June. “It undermines what little credibility they have left.” Traci Thomas agrees. In an email, she told me that she would like to see “verified users or reviews that get a check (or something) in exchange for proving they’ve read the book.”

If Amazon will not put the resources into controlling the wrath of Goodreads, then what fairness requires here is a strong taboo: Do not review a book you haven’t read. We should stigmatize uninformed opinions the way we stigmatize clipping your nails on public transport, talking with your mouth full, or claiming that your peacock is a service animal. A little self-control from the rest of us will make it easier for writers to approach incendiary topics, safe in the knowledge that they will be criticized only for things they’ve actually done.

TikTok is gearing up to join Chinese titans Shein and Temu in competing for a share of the global e-commerce market. The short-form video-sharing platform is preparing to launch a program that will help Chinese merchants sell goods to the US and beyond, the The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday (July 25).

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